So Secretary of State Colin Powell has decided to resign. Good for him. The trouble is he completely lost all his credibility by not resigning a long time ago.
Powell’s problem has always been that he’s a very principled man, but loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief is his most basic principle. That’s too bad, because he was sworn to serve and protect the country, not the president.
Powell should have resigned when the “enemy combatants” went to Guantanamo, with the understanding that the president, by allowing that to happen, was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and was putting U.S. troops at risk of being treated the same way.
If not then, Powell should have resigned when the Bush administration asked him to lie in front of the U.N. about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Though he claims now that the intelligence he used for that hearing was the best available, his military experience and the word of the international inspectors should have told him otherwise. The Powell we get in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack knew better, understood that Iraq was not going to be the cakewalk that Bush and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz envisioned, knew that if we broke it, we’d own it. Instead of allowing his resignation to send a message to an administration deaf to his reasoned warnings, instead of trumpeting it before the World and the American people, Powell decided instead to shill for his Commander-in-Chief.
We’re still paying the price for Powell’s misplaced loyalties. So I think it’s good that Powell is resigning. It’s just far too late to matter much now.
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